Wales Millennium Centre

Wales Millennium Centre (WMC) is Wales’ home of the performing arts, situated at the heart of Cardiff Bay.

It has an established reputation as one of Europe’s pre-eminent centres for the performing arts and is an iconic arts and cultural destination. It is one of the UK’s top cultural attractions, Wales’s No.1 visitor attraction and has welcomed over 16.5m visitors since opening in 2004.

After a competitive tender process in 2017, Made Media were appointed to redesign WMC’s website, alongside a branding exercise undertaken by our friends at North. Our process kicked off with an intensive week of on-site discovery to uncover the Centre’s requirements and desires related to the new site.

As well as bringing the general look and feel up to date, and implementing the new site responsively (a no-brainer in 2018), the new site had to address a number of WMC-specific challenges.

• Bilingualism. As a leading Welsh institution, and the national arts centre of Wales, WMC is under a statutory and cultural obligation to work bilingually, presenting Welsh and English on an equal footing. The challenge with the website is to ensure that the bilingual approach is comprehensive, doesn’t favour English as the dominant language, and makes an active offer to the user about the language in which they want to interact with the website.
  
  
• Make the brand sing. We spent a bit of time talking about singing. Not just because we were in Wales, but because the idea is literally written on the front of the building. In seriousness, it was important to WMC and their stakeholders that the new website reflected the broad mission of the Centre and their position as the home of the performing arts in Wales. 
  
  
• Improve conversions and engagement. A new website is a significant investment, and needs to demonstrate return on investment. In terms of hard objectives, these were set largely around revenue and conversion, with the aim of increasing conversion rates through the website and the average value of orders when users bought tickets.
  
  
• Provide for a dynamic content strategy. Another clear opportunity for the team at WMC was to use content in better ways, to compete for attention in the live entertainment and cultural landscape of Cardiff and South Wales. In order to facilitate this, the website needs to be able to present the content in easily searchable, digestible and relatable ways, and be able to link this content closely to the events and experiences that the Centre is promoting.

The site was implemented responsively in SilverStripe, our preferred CMS for performing arts and cultural organisations.

For the ticketing path, we employed our mobile-responsive, Tessitura-integrated middleware product, BlocksOffice, and customised it to meet the specific needs of WMC. BlocksOffice, like the front-end of the website, can be made fully multi-lingual, by adding translations of all the text that appears in the site into the BlocksOffice control panel. It also allows text that comes directly from the ticketing system to be dynamically replaced with either the English or Welsh public-facing text as needed. We made sure that the full user journey is presented bilingually, including ensuring that post-purchase communications, like confirmation emails, are sent in the language in which the online user completed their checkout.

The new site launched in August 2018, and we’re already seeing concrete results and great feedback. The new site has also been warmly received by the team at WMC.

This is just the beginning of a journey for Wales Millennium Centre, and we are working in close collaboration with the team to plan and implement a roadmap for the site that will build on the success of the re-launch.

Diolch, Canolfan Mileniwm Cymru!